Saphrax loves fire as much as the next phoenix, but he absolutely hates the smoke. It smells like butt and it burns his lungs. Not to mention, smoke and ash take away the beauty from the flickering flames. So when the volcano started to erupt, Saphrax watched for a moment where the river meets the sea, but then he hi-tailed it back to Solterra where he could barricade himself in his home. After all, not only did the smoke and ash burn his lungs, but it ruined his perfectly pristine coat and that simply could not happen.
When the dust finally settled, Saphrax took to the sky to survey the damage. He was being downright nosey. He had no real need-to-know, he just was curious about what sort of devastation the volcano had caused. And so, as he flies towards where the island once was, he cannot help but notice that as he flies further from the shore, he should be getting closer to the small island where the volcano was.
It doesn’t take him long to realize that there is no island, no volcano, nothing that was once there before. How strange, indeed! He continues to fly forward, looking down at the strange bridge that has seemed to form over the sea. It didn’t look safe and so he had decided to stay in the sky. And yet, the farther he flew, the heavier the air seemed to be. It took more effort and energy to keep in him flight than it ever did. Such a strange phenomenon.
And just as he was about to turn around and head back towards shore, he is greeted with a tall wall of ivy. He cannot go around it, the air far too dense. It’s the monsters that lay waiting prey to turn to the water that has his attention. All of this screamed danger. And in a quick moment of “HELL NOPE”, Saphrax turns and heads back to shore. He does not overstay his welcome. He prides his appearance and his life.
STAFF EDIT***
@saphrax has rolled a 2, and has been awarded +40 signos!
05-29-2019, 04:20 AM
Played by
Zombie [PM] Posts: 103 — Threads: 8 Signos: 325
There is something about the events happening just of the shore of Novus that has her interest peaked. Normally Sloane isn’t one to dabble in the fights between gods and men, but there is something curious about this one. It doesn’t scream from the gods and yet, it’s not from this realm either. When there is loose magic such as this running amuck, there are secrets buried deep, secrets that she needs to know about.
And with a smile like a Cheshire cat, the mare slips past the closed Delumine boarders and heads towards where the volcano has once been. When she arrives, she sees individuals coming and going, whispering of a great wall of ivy, of monsters, and of strange things embedded in the bridge. It has her attention, her curiosity is peaked. And so, she mare steps foot on the strange bridge, her eyes forward and her confidence high.
She wanders, her eyes taking in all the information at her fingertips. When she comes to the pearls embedded in the bridge, she cannot help but pause her journey in order to collect the pearls for later use. Hoof scrapes against hardened lava, making good effort to break the pearls free from their bondage. And yet, they are clung to so tightly that she cannot break them lose. So strange. And if that was not strange enough, Sloane comes upon something else.
A wall of ivy stretches towards the sky, it’s height infinite and his strangeness on another level. Where had this come from? Nothing so grand could have been grown in such a short time from natural means. This was some sort of magic that she didn’t quite understand. She stands there in awe, watching as others come and go. They do not bother her. Surely someone knows what has happened here. “You! What has happened here?” She doesn’t care who she asks or if they truly know the answer to her question or not. She supposes it doesn’t really matter. She will stand here until someone can answer.
STAFF EDIT***
@Sloane has rolled a 3, and has been awarded +80 signos!/blockquote>
Unlike most, Targwyn watched the volcano from the time it began to erupt until the time the ash finally settled. She looked at those around her who trembled in fear. She couldn’t help but sneer at those that were panicked about if the volcano would destroy the lives of those in Novus. She was in awe of the destruction, the ability for the volcano to destroy so many things.
So when it finally settled, she wanted to get a closer look. With confidence, she stepped onto the bridge. She wanted to lay eyes on the earth that wanted to claim this world. For once, there was excitement that coursed through her veins. She wanted so badly to lay eyes on this work of absolute magic.
But the closer she got, the more she began to wonder just what sort of magic this was. The closer she got towards the island, the more she began to realize that the island no longer existed. Something had swallowed it up as if it was nothing but a cheerio floating in a bowl of cereal. The only thing that kept her moving forward were the whispers of danger up ahead.
And as she continued on, Targwyn began to see just what the others were whispering about. Monsters lay just on the other side of the bridge, waiting patiently for someone to join them in the water. It gave Targwyn great pleasure to see just how many were still so afraid. She was not afraid, but perhaps she should be.
And then the ivy wall came. Targwyn looked at it, not seeing danger as some did. “What a disappointment.” Perhaps she had been looking for something more. Perhaps she had been hoping to see some big scary monster that ate the ones who looked upon it. When one is expecting to go face to face with a monster only to be greeting with a wall of vegetation, it sucks away the beauty of it. She sighs. This had been a waste of time and energy.
STAFF EDIT***
@Targwyn has rolled a 6, and has been awarded A mollusk shell that when crushed IC will allow for an extra RE roll (but only for RE threads during the SWP). Please see the RE post of this thread for details.
She had drifted in and out of consciousness nightmare-ridden and sweat-soaked, a fisher boat caught on a furious sea. A series of dreams — rare as they were to visit, whenever they did they did so with feverish delight, as startling and disjointed as the Weaver’s crudely told (sang, more like) tales — dragged her under the waves, gasping, reeling. She didn’t remember all of them, only two.
A white falcon ripping into the chest of a glass eyed canary, whose pale throat still trembled with elegiac song. The blood had turned her stomach, and though in the edges of her wandering psyche Aghavni had known that the white falcon was Nestor, and that Nestor would never hurt her, the canary’s eyes — dying and horrifically beautiful in their glazed black finality — had sickened her. And then the dream had sputtered (her head coming up for air) until she had drowned again, only this time instead of a canary it was a woman — her mother, she’d realized much later — and instead of a white falcon it was a mass of faceless bodies hurling spears and flames and fury at her small, bloodsoaked back. A hall lined with mirrors, her mother’s sweet laughter. Spools and spools of emerald silk.
Aghavni had jerked awake to the sound of her own coughing, violent and heaving, ash coating her lungs like powdered hemlock.
She doesn’t remember how she had made her way down to the moonlit shore.
One moment she had been in her room, pacing like a chained starling (couldn’t fly away for the winter, trapped and alone and frightened and doomed), her steel-lined folding fan snapping open and shut, open and shut. The silk rustled like the hush, hush of reeds in summer.
The moon had risen, round as those little white cakes they served in the Lounge whenever a crate of them arrived from her father’s shipping ports, to its midnight throne. Still early by the Scarab’s accounts, but after penning the letter to her father and, with Charon’s approval, locking the wings of the beetle,
(The little sign out front read:
Closed for imminent disaster. None will be served tonight.)
she had drifted into a fitful sleep. And by the time Aghavni had come to, she had found herself ankle deep in seawater.
Her hair, unbound, spills from her neck and billows in the wind like snapping sails. It takes her a minute, almost two, before three observations line themselves up like stowaways on a plank.
One: the dawning sky is as clear as seaglass.
Two: it no longer smells of burning.
Three: there is a bridge made of still-cooling lava stretched over the sea, and it is leading to the end of the world.
Aghavni thinks she is still dreaming when she steps cautiously, ballerina light, onto the tarlike, oozing rock. It simmers and hisses underhoof, the spilled guts of an earth dwelling beast.
It is only when the girl is halfway across the bridge and sees something shift in the churning waters below, the glint of a scale or whisper of a fin, that she accepts with eerie calm that she is not, in fact, dreaming. The monsters in her dreams are never so coy.
But she is not in the business of abandoning things unfinished. Her hooves, small and built high instead of wide, wobble precariously in the lava rock’s uneven ridges. Seaspray tosses flecks of white into her eyes, and though the bridge radiates with a molten heat, steaming away the cold, Aghavni cannot stop the tremors running like lightning through her bones.
It is a long time before she reaches the end.
But when she steps off the rock Aghavni knows that the wall of living green — ivy, the kind that climbs and smothers — is not the end. Only an obstacle, like the gates guarding hell. (Feeling silly, she scans right and left for signs of a Cerberus. In her sleepwalking stupor she had neglected to bring a blade, and she is not yet deft enough in steel fan-throwing to take much comfort in the fan tucked in the nest of her hair.)
“Theófos.” It takes every last drop of resolve in her body to stop herself from scrambling backwards into the sea, or forwards into the ivy. Gasping, she shields her eyes from the burst of light.
Something — someone — materializes in the glow. A tiger, Aghavni thinks in a cold sweat, when she makes out the glint of tiger orange and the dark of tiger stripes, but the shape is not right.
She places the ax before she places the woman. Transfixed, she watches as the blade swings down in a beautiful arc to hack at the wall.
“Is there something behind it?” Her voice carries through the dark, braver than she feels. “This is not the end, is it.”
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
He watches her and beneath his gaze Minya’s head carries a little higher, her neck curving gracefully. Her steps are a dance, sensual and graceful. Even has death rises in crimson anger upon the horizon Minya moves as if she were dancing. She was, after all, made to be a feast for the eyes. Each moment is hers to own and she seizes it with a smile made for gods and a body no less than nature’s finest art.
Beneath the heavy bow of her black lashes, Minya watches the volcano roar and pour itself across the sea. It reaches for the girl of stone and the boy of gold who stands beside her. Was this the end of the world? Still August’s words hang between them. They prod at her, testing each of her beliefs for what this world is, what it means to her. Slowly, with trinkets chiming, Minya turns to bathe him in the silver of her eyes. Oh her gaze is as distant as the blotted-out stars above their heads, her expression as cold as the void surrounding them. “What makes you think it isn’t?”
She turns the question back upon him, a mirror but for the accentuation. “You are not acting like a man about to die. Why not?” Dismissively the Night girl shakes her head, her hair rippling like a ribbon in the wind. “I will not die here. I have not yet acquired enough jewels or admirers.” The smile upon her lips is wicked and small. It is a window to a cold frigid enough to bite like frost.
Graceful, powerful, beautiful, August steps toward the bridge that reaches their beach at last. Minya watches him go, content to watch a man drown if it meant her life be spared. But he looks back, waiting and with a huff, with another flick of her acid pink hair, the girl brushes past him. Her ears are buried within the thick silk of her hair. Her eyes watch him, darkened by shadow. She stops before the bridge and waits for him to ascend first. Chivalry was valuable when her safety was not known. Better he die than she, shared tattoo or not.
A soft, startled hiss escapes her lips as a tentacle reaches up upon the bridge at their passing. She bumps into August, her ears falling back tightly to her skull as her slender limbs stop their skittering and she pushes forward to lead them down the rest of the bridge. “Now,” She finishes for him, her silken voice short and sharp, “you are looking for answers where there are none. Bad things happen, nonsensical things happen. The gods are selfish and they do not care. There may be no pattern at all, even if there was, deal with it.”
And with the set of her jaw, the girl stalks on, away from her own violent ghosts, away from the beach stretching away like safety fading into the horizon.
@Random Events @August | "speaks" | notes: skidding in here at the last moment!
Fire in flesh, the cooling embers that still simmer and hiss when water is too near, Juniper stood tall and proud throughout the aching night with Asterion by her side. Waves battered her ankles, pulling her toward the unknown in the darkness. Oh, but the sea is a place that Juniper so rarely goes. When dawn breaks, her heart lurches - not from that glistening, strange bridge that stretches like death's fingers into eternity. Not from the endless sky that begs her forward, pleading a sweet come, come my child. No.
Juniper balks at the sea that was nowhere to be found in her swamplands and marshy home. Green eyes go wide, her skin shrinks and shivers as she shies into the Dusk sovereign's side.
But he is surging with the bodies, he moves like a river. Away. Away Asterion slips and terror plunges greedy fangs into her lion-heart. Feet move, grappling with the black grounds and broken shells that glimmer as mermaid tears would. This is a forest made from the ocean, a walkway into the unknown. How long has she loved the unknown? Those adventures always came with shadows, with copses of sequoia and weeping willows and the press of cypress bodies so close to her own. They were covered, protected.
Athough her billowing stormy cloak now sheathes her and shields her, Juniper is naked.
Never before has she felt so exposed, not even when twirling in the skies, for clouds always came to whisper and sing to her with the wind high above.
She moves like a wild thing, like a shadow wraith. Slender body slips through the crowd, wings press tight to her sides until she sees the flash of brown and night sky. No one else is there, none other in her tunnel-vision until she is alongside the King. The King who painted with her and laughed when she did. Kaleidoscope pictures race in her mind's eye, she pants for a moment, oblivious to those that shy away from the wall or bite at it. Others just pray.
It is of no consequence and cannot compare to the sheer panic of this vastness that threatens to overwhelm her. The free girl, the swamp girl, the ephemeral girl looks to the shattered path and spray of green from hacking axes that falls at her feet. She stares and stares, divining the answers of eternity and the answers needed now in that concentration, and slowly Juniper pulls herself together piece by piece until she is no longer panting. But she still shivers, she still holds that sliver of fear when green eyes avoid the depthless sea below them and around them. She's not yet ready to be swallowed whole and drowned. Kelpies will not claim her yet. “Vespera, hold us in your heart and in your arms. Deity of Dusk and dying light, heart of my heart, cleanse the fear from me, pull it from my veins like water from a cup. I am yours and you are mine, I give myself unto you now today and forever more, I beg you do not abandon us now." It is a whisper, a murmur so hard to hear above the buzz and humming of the crowds meant only for herself and her brave-heart to consume.
With a last shudder, the girl stands tall at last. “Will it open?" she asks anyone who will listen, voice rising above the clamoring as she looks to the vines and thinks of those sinking temples, of masked stairways, and all that that was her playground as a girl.
@Asterion and everyone else nearby| "speaks" | notes: c:
From the moment she’d turned away and put her back to that black and roiling cloud, guilt had begun to gnaw at her. It was a fat cat lying across her shoulders, a hot, self-satisfied weight. You coward, it whispered, well-pleased; you’re absolutely right to run away.
O wouldn’t run, she knew - neither would Caine - neither would Veer, for that matter, and by the time she landed sweat-slick and ash-grainy on her own quiet window-ledge she was near to seething with herself. But oh! she thought as she paced, stiff-legged, it had been too much! All the birds had been fleeing, too, even as the horses gathered on the beach, and Elif had let herself become the small and fearful girl she’d fought so hard against.
When at last she forced herself to sleep, she was resolved: when she woke, whatever was waiting there at the edge of the sea, she would meet it with the others.
She was a little bemused, then, to wake and find the sky a bright and spring-like blue. But now her curiosity was the hungriest thing in her, and as she surged back into that clear expanse she did not spare a look for her court, once more crouched under tyranny, once more threatened by disaster.
At first she tried to fly out to that sunken island, and the end of that long strange bridge. She did not trust the water, not like she did the air and the wind (elements she had been born to, elements that she was sure loved her back). But the air grew thick and slow and her wing-beats each more ponderous and heavy than the last until she was forced down, to land with a new nervousness among the throng of horses. That worry fluttered like a moth in her throat, made her green eyes wary and watchful; she did not see anyone she knew. Elif was grateful for the band of scarlet snug around her throat, for the wind that brushed her wing-tips when she whispered come.
And so she joined the long, long march to the end of Novus.
There were prayers all around her, but Elif offered none of her own. Perhaps this was a path built by the gods, she thought, but she no longer has the surety she was born with; such uncertainty felt like standing on quicksand, like feeling an eruption beneath your feet. But once they reached the wall - before she dared fly up to find the end to those strange vines, before she thought if it was just another maze, before she put her mouth to that strange fruit - another pegasus caught her eye, her dark mouth moving, her eyes alight. Elif drifted near enough to catch her question.
“I’m not sure I want to be standing here when it does,” she said, and almost shivered.
Below Zero
my frost philosophy will put no curse on me
When the volcano had first woken, she was deep beneath the waves – deep beyond the island’s reach. When the dust first hit the sky, and the lava heated the waters, only a faint shift in the vapors trailing her skin whispered of a difference. No, she hadn’t been present for that. She had been present for the bridge that formed, for those that seemed to gather before it. And she had done so too. Not for curiosity over an island that had vanished, but for what she saw now. The hardened rock beneath her was stretched through her beloved sea, as if mocking it into nothing but a mere obstacle easily overcome. She traveled it with caution, gaze watching. Things were no right.
She moved slowly, the vapors trailing over her body dropping temperature, protecting her from any lava not yet hardened to stone, keeping her body cool. It seemed a macabre mocking of the water, as pearls dotted the stone, oysters trapped in time and stone. She frowned as she glanced at the seaweed, sniffing what was a preferred treat to her (real grass lacked the rich flavor of seagrasses in her marine-tinted view), but dare not touch what to her was foreign and . . . wrong. The bridge stretched for miles, holding mysteries and secrets within its stony grasp.
She carried on however. Seawater lapping at her hooves in some parts, while others seemed to shimmer like stars, wrong . . . it all felt wrong. As she continued further things seemed to make less since, feathers forming flowers, pink sand artfully decorating the black, and odd pieces of metal spinning, and fruit blooming from stone. She wondered what foreign piece of land had been misplaced onto their island – for surely this wasn’t of Novus, of even the planet they were on.
Then a new strangeness startled her, tentacles rising, or broken fins decorating the foam caps. Stories of other such monsters hit her mind, these stories of a planet her people were rumored to have come from – stories passed down more generations than they could count – stories not believed to be truth anymore. Giant Leviathans of the likes no one had seen before, dangerous and eager to eat all in their path. She stayed away from the edge, unwilling to risk it even if she was yearning to disappear into the water and see what it was beneath the water’s surface. But it sang wrong to her . . . . something had corrupted the beloved waters, and for the aqua-equine, it filled her soul with sadness.
A wall of ivy seemed to suddenly enter her vision, and as she did so, she noted others gathering around, stopping. Her eyes weren’t for the horses, keeping her distance from the others, as her tail swished in agitation over what was clearly so wrong. The ivy was reaching, seemingly moving towards the horses closest, and she couldn’t help but wonder . . . what was beyond the ivy . . . and was it filled with as much wrongness as what was on this side?
Thoughts Speech
i feel no cold, i feel no fear inside my mind Now I'm full of energy
STAFF EDIT***
@Below Zero has rolled a 6, and has been awarded A mollusk shell that when crushed IC will allow for an extra RE roll (but only for RE threads during the SWP). Please see the RE post of this thread for details.
When the smoke clears at dawn, Caine takes to the skies.
In the days after the first cloud of black ash marked the beginning of what he has since dubbed (privately, and with undue irony) the Panic, Caine has almost managed to forget all about the imminent disaster rolling in from yonder.
Even the coming of the end of the world — as the doomsayers and fisher wives of the market like to shriek into the ears of anyone near — can’t keep a man (and spy and assassin) from his work. If anything, the Panic has only made it easier.
He ducks his head into his chest and coughs. Pockets of ash are nestled deep within the clouds, trapped there by the mist, and he has flown right through one. Sealing his lips and flattening his nostrils, he tucks his wings like a falcon and angles into a dive. Best to get out of the ash cloud before it blinds him.
Nose first in his dive, Caine’s eyes widen as they snag on a figure of red streaking past like a pint-sized comet. “Elif?”
Snapping his wings outwards to slow his descent, he sucks air through his teeth as the current drags him down further and further. His shoulders ache as he fights fiercely against the wind. In the grey haze he knows he has lost her, but he is not too bothered. Caine is almost certain about her destination.
The same as his.
Soon enough, he drags himself back up to the correct elevation and does not look down again until the horizon looms up in a strange green divide, and the crowd of Denoctians on the beach swarm busier than ants.
He touches down behind Elif with a soft whoosh against the volcanic rock. He ignores the others around them — the girl she is talking to, he barely notices — and steps up besides her to drag his gaze up towards the wall of what seems to be ivy. Then farther up, seeking the blue, blue sky. Which never comes.
“I tried to fly past it, but I reckon it reaches so far up it splits Solis’ dwellings in two.” That is, if the sun god hasn’t willed it into existence himself. Caine's smile curls in a self-satisfied way. He wouldn’t put it past him.
@Elif @Random Events | "speaks" | notes: slipping this in past the deadline because caine needs that swp exp c':
So give me life, give me fire
Cause I'm drowning in the ocean of you and I
Curiosity pulled against him like the moon to the ocean’s current. He was driven to get out and explore, to sniff out the source of what was happening and why it was happening. It had been an eruption, obviously, but… the volcano everyone had seen off in the distance had never been there before.
But not even his thirst for the unknown could overpower his need to stay with Fiona and comfort her during those dark, dismal days of uncertainty. Together they waited out the downpour of ash, Atreus often hanging his wing over her petite form and pressing gently against her, a tender reminder that she wasn’t alone in facing this. He attempted to distract her with conversation and showing her some of the things he had collected over his years outside of Novus, items like books, rare flowers and other trinkets he didn’t often take out for anyone to see.
When the day came that the ash cleared and gave way to what might be considered a typical morning, the two of them finally ventured out of the citadel to join the others. The lingering particles tickled his nose and tried to irritate his eyes, but his focus fell only to Fiona and the strange bridge that stretched endlessly across the sea to somewhere none of them could see. It was suspicious, and Atreus regarded the structure with apprehension. Truth be told, he didn’t want Fiona to step foot on it – but he also knew better than to try and hold her back or doubt her capabilities. She had already proven to him that she was so much stronger than what met the eye.
A smile tugged at the corners of his lips when the sound of her voice washed over the thoughts in his mind, and turning his head, he pressed his nose tenderly into her neck before taking those first few steps onto the bridge. “Always.”
![[Image: i-jTNwWx8.png]](https://photos.smugmug.com/BelowZeroNovus/n-X9d9fZ/i-jTNwWx8/1/e09fb6c3/O/i-jTNwWx8.png)
